Wandering through a used book store, I came across a copy of Robert Massie’s 1991 door-stopper 1,007-page history “Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War”. I remember hearing about this book when it was first published, and thought – If not now, when?
There is more than a whiff of Anglophilia in Mr. Massie’s account, beginning with Nelson’s naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805 and continuing until Prime Minister Asquith listened to the clock striking midnight on August 4, 1914, signaling England’s entry into World War I.
The book dwells upon the many conflicts which plagued the Europeans in the later part of the 19th Century, including the horrific Boer War England imposed on southern Africa. Much of the book is taken up with the personalities & foibles of the European Ruling Classes. For example, in the later 1800s, the well-bred young Englishwoman would get married to someone suitable in her late teens, when she was at her most fertile. While she was delivering a number of male heirs to her husband, other upper class English males considered her to be off limits. Once she had done her duty, it was open season.
Winston Churchill’s situation was a little different. After Winston’s birth in 1874, his father contracted syphilis in some random encounter with the lower classes, thereby putting an end to conjugal relations. Winston’s beautiful but somewhat slutty American mother (whom he adored) then proceeded to work her way through England’s finest, reportedly bedding about 200 of them. The high-level contacts she thus made were instrumental in Winston’s meteoric rise to First Lord of the Admiralty by the age of 36 in 1911.
The interesting part of the book is the relatively limited coverage of the eponymous dreadnought – a class of warships attempting to hold on to England’s rapidly declining mastery of the oceans. The first Dreadnought was authorized in 1905, driven by the Admiralty’s then First Lord Jackie Fisher’s desire never to get into a fair fight. The Dreadnought would have bigger guns than any other ship, enabling her to hit enemy vessels while out of range of returned fire. She would be faster than any enemy ship, able to outmaneuver and keep a safe distance. She would be more heavily armored, in case any enemy somehow managed to hit her.
It was an engineering challenge to achieve those competing objectives, and trade-offs were unavoidable. More armor made the ship heavier, requiring bigger engines to reach the intended speed. Heavier guns required a bigger hull, which in turn required bigger engines, which meant more armor plating. The result was a very expensive behemoth.
There were many other features about the design. Typical warships in those days carried guns with a variety of calibers, which made range-finding complicated. Dreadnought’s guns would all be 12 inch beasts, which made targeting easier. Instead of each gun being targeted individually, control would be centralized in an elevated gun director, able to see over the smoke of the guns.
However, England’s economic & technological lead over other Europeans was disappearing at the end of the 19th Century, [driven by its singular commitment to “Free Trade”, one might suspect]. Other Europeans began building their own dreadnoughts in an expensive nautical arms race, leading to the development of the oil-fueled super-dreadnought. Germany, in particular, began to build highly competitive warships.
As a maritime empire, England’s earlier 19th Century policy had been to have a navy which was equal to the next two biggest navies combined. With England’s relative decline, that was no longer affordable by the end of the century. Instead, England proposed a policy that Germany should accept England having 60% more dreadnoughts than them. Germany declined, and the arms race continued, driving a wedge between the two formerly-friendly countries.
Massie’s book implies that Europe had been on the brink of war for decades in the later 1800s, with disputes over the race for colonies in Africa between England & France and France & Germany, in addition to the issue of restive populations within Europe itself. And eventually, inevitably, the war came.